Conservative Crusaders
In Milwaukee last July, President Bush stood before a
predominantly black audience at Holy Redeemer Institutional
Church of God in Christ and basked in its applause. Touting his
faith-based initiative, Bush spoke of how churches such as Holy
Redeemer-which runs a variety of job-training programs, four
schools, and a housing facility for seniors-help welfare
recipients and educate poor children through school voucher
programs.
“The federal government should not ask, ‘Does your
organization believe in God?’ ” Bush told the approving crowd.
“They ought to ask, ‘Does your program work?’ ” Federal agencies,
the president declared, should remove regulations that
“discriminate” against providers of faith-based social services.
Bush’s words not only resonated among the 5,000
congregants of Holy Redeemer; they also brought a smile to
Michael Grebe, who was in the audience that day. Grebe is
president of Milwaukee’s Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation,
which has been a generous supporter of Holy Redeemer’s programs,
as well as other faith-based social service efforts in the city.
Grants from Bradley have also funded the work of intellectuals
who’ve studied faith-based programs, three of whom-John DiIulio,
Stanley Carlson-Thies, and David Kuo-were named by Bush to guide
the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives
during its heady first days.
The Bradley Foundation has always “been willing to
challenge the status quo,” Bush said at Holy Redeemer. “I’m
honored you’re here.”
The Bradley Foundation’s financial and ideological
backing of Bush’s faith-based initiative is just one example
among many of how conservative foundations across the United
States are working hard to influence the policy agenda in
Washington and elsewhere in the nation.
Where the traditional, well-established, and more-liberal
lions of the foundation world such as the Ford Foundation and the
Carnegie Corporation of New York were once seen as the
trendsetters, today it is the conservative grant-makers-the
Bradley Foundation, the David H. Koch Charitable Foundation, the
John M. Olin Foundation, the Sarah Scaife Foundation, and others-
that are creating a buzz.
Grants from these well-heeled conservative donors have
supported everything from school vouchers to Social Security
privatization to welfare reform to pro-marriage programs, all
among the most radical public policy ideas promoted by anyone, of
either the political Left or the Right, in recent years.
Today, foundations of all ideological stripes are
spending more than ever before to promote their pet social and
political causes. Despite the hit foundation coffers have taken
from the stock market’s decline, foundation grants have held
steady in recent years, according to a report by the
authoritative and nonpartisan Foundation Center.
In 2001, according to the center, the 1,000 largest
private foundations in the United States spent nearly $650
million on public-affairs, civil-rights, and social-action
projects, a category that includes local, state, and federal
spending on everything from think tanks to interest-group
activism. That amount was more than twice what those foundations
spent on such grants in 1997. And it’s fair to say that overall,
private philanthropy enjoys a sterling reputation in Washington.
But the talk in Washington-among both liberals and
conservatives-is all about the cadre of conservative and
strategically aggressive philanthropic groups. “Who would have
thought 20 or 30 years ago that we’d be talking about Social
Security privatization, the dismantling of the progressive tax
system, and school vouchers?” asks Chuck Collins, program
director for the liberal group United for a Fair Economy.
Conservative foundations, he said, have “really changed the terms
of the debate.”
William Voegeli, program officer at New York City-based
conservative Olin Foundation, one of the most highly regarded in
public policy circles, says that the right-of-center foundations
are “wary of supporting endeavors that preach to the choir.”
Instead, Voegeli said, they are looking for people who are making
new arguments and are “getting noticed, shaping the agenda, and
moving the ball down the field.” Even more critical, say the
myriad grantees that have benefited from the largesse of the
Bradleys and Olins, is the steadfastness of these foundations;
they are willing to fund programs for the long haul.
Bush’s plan to funnel additional government funds to
faith-based social service providers has failed to overcome
Democratic opposition in the Senate. But Grebe said that the
Bradley Foundation is pouring more money than ever into promoting
the idea through its research. To keep the faith-based issue on
the front burner, the Bradley Foundation is underwriting a new
Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal at the Hudson
Institute, an Indianapolis think tank. The center will conduct
research into the merits of faith-based social services; its head
is William Schambra, a former vice president at the Bradley
Foundation. On April 22, President Bush named Schambra to a
recess appointment as a board member of the federal Corporation
for National and Community Service.
And win or lose in Washington, Schambra says that
Bradley-with help from President Bush-has turned stereotypes of
conservatives on their heads. Bradley’s $1 million grant to help
Holy Redeemer build a community center was among the largest ever
from a foundation to a black Pentecostal church.
“This is peculiar politics,” Schambra said, but it makes
sense. The Bradley Foundation’s mission is to promote such
conservative values as self-respect and personal responsibility-
values that Holy Redeemer stresses as well. The foundation also
champions an overarching belief that community organizations
generally provide better services than government-run programs
can. Regardless of the fate of Bush’s original faith-based
initiative, Schambra said, “the fact that he is using the
presidency to bring that message is incredibly critical.”
Strategic Agenda
The conservative foundations have made long-term grants-and
collaborated with other conservative grant-makers-to fund myriad
elements of the conservative movement. Right-leaning think tanks
have enjoyed some of the most-generous support. Since the mid-
1980s, the Bradley Foundation, for example, has given more than
$14 million to the American Enterprise Institute for Public
Policy Research and more than $12.5 million to the Heritage
Foundation, according to the foundation watchdog group Media
Transparency. During the same period, the Olin Foundation gave
more than $7.6 million to Heritage and more than $6.5 million to
AEI.
Much of that funding has come in the form of general
operating grants that aren’t limited to any particular project.
Both Bradley and Olin have also given millions of dollars to many
other smaller think tanks and activist groups. Bradley has funded
conservative periodicals such as Commentary, First Things, and
The National Interest.
Other conservative foundations are using the same model.
The Sarah Scaife Foundation has given more than $15 million to
Heritage since 1985. The David Koch Foundation helped the
libertarian Cato Institute get off the ground in the late 1970s,
and has given millions to it since then. Universities have
benefited, too. The Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation has
given more than $10 million to George Mason University to allow
it to set up the anti-regulatory Mercatus Center, and to lure
Nobel Prize economist Vernon Smith from the University of
Arizona.
“We have a role to play in sustaining a conservative
intellectual infrastructure,” Grebe explained.
Making their work all the more interesting is that the
Bradleys, Kochs, Olins, and Scaifes of the world are tiny
compared with the resources of other foundations. At the end of
2001, the Bradley Foundation was the 83rd-largest in the United
States, with $580 million in assets, according to Foundation
Center rankings. Scaife, with $323 million in assets, Olin, with
$71 million, and the Koch family foundations, with $68 million,
didn’t even make the top 100. The Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation, by contrast, was the largest in the United States,
with nearly $33 billion in assets.
Many of the large foundations maintain a substantial
presence in Washington. Almost universally, however, they say
they eschew ideology and view their role in the public policy
process as that of a facilitator, not an advocate. Consider the
Gates Foundation. In October 2001, it opened a Washington office
run by former Clinton Commerce Department official David Lane.
But foundation spokesman Joe Cerrell says that the Washington
office’s main functions are to keep tabs on the foundation’s East
Coast grantees, and to provide information to government agencies
on health care and education when they request it. The foundation
steers clear of activism, Cerrell said.
The conservative foundations, by contrast, are willing to
show their ideological stripes. Liberal critics, as a result,
speak of them in conspiratorial terms. These critics say that the
conservative foundations tread too close to the legal line
separating philanthropic enterprises from activist ones. That
delineation is important, because foundations cannot lobby or
specifically earmark grants for lobbying as it is defined in
Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. Such foundations,
the code says, cannot actively promote a particular viewpoint on
legislation to a member of Congress.
Peter Dreier, a professor at Occidental College in Los
Angeles who has studied foundations, believes that conservative
foundations “are much more willing [than liberal or traditional
foundations] to cross the line on the 501(c)(3) stuff.”
Steve Clemons, executive vice president of the New
America Foundation, is another critic. He argues in a recent
report, “The Corruption of Think Tanks,” that some of these
policy institutes have become nothing more than conduits through
which wealthy individuals lobby Congress while avoiding taxation.
To further their agendas, Clemons writes, the wealthy can pay
lobbyists or make political contributions-both of which are
taxable expenses-or they can “make major unlimited contributions
to think tanks to host congressional staff for dinners,
conferences, and trips.” Of course, these think tanks may not do
“lobbying” as the IRS defines it. But, he contends, they
regularly produce and distribute policy reports aimed at
advocating change.
Similarly, liberal writer Mark Dowie in his recent book,
American Foundations: An Investigative History, argues that
foundations need to be made more accountable to the public.
Because foundation funds are sheltered from taxation, he says,
the public should have a say in how they are spent. Dowie
contends that no foundation should be allowed to hold more than
$1 billion in assets, and that elected officials should appoint
some of the members on every foundation’s board.
Perhaps more noteworthy than the critics’ arguments,
however, is how little their complaints have resonated among
public policy activists and in official Washington. Even the
most-liberal activists interviewed for this article said that
they respect the means of the conservative foundations, even as
they deplore their ends.
Rick Cohen, executive director of the liberal National
Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, said that conservative
foundations recognize that “Washington is a battleground for
ideas,” and that conservative foundations are “unabashed” in
their willingness to join that battle. “Their effectiveness,” he
said, is “quite admirable.”
Critics From the Left and Right
Although it’s certainly not the case today, liberal and
conservative efforts to reform or even eliminate private
foundations have occasionally resonated strongly in America.
Almost as soon as the first major foundations were formed, early
in the 20th century, liberals denounced them “as instruments of
capitalist manipulation,” wrote Waldemar Nielsen in his history
of foundations, The Golden Donors. By the 1950s, the tables had
turned, and it was the conservatives who were on the attack.
These conservative critics condemned foundations as a venue for
an unaccountable elite to exercise undue influence.
And private foundations, of course, have long dabbled in
the Washington game. “Working with and influencing government
programs in certain fields, particularly health, education, and
scientific research, has long been a practice of the larger and
more energetic foundations,” Nielsen wrote. From the beginning,
the granddaddies of the foundation world, such as the Carnegie
and Ford Foundations, gave money to think tanks and activist
groups.
In the 1960s, Ford broke new ground by pouring
unprecedented sums into some of the major ideological fights of
the era, working to expand civil rights and reduce poverty.
But it was around the same time that Democratic Rep.
Wright Patman of Texas launched a multiyear investigation into
foundations. What he found became a major scandal: Wealthy
Americans were using foundations to promote political campaigns,
to enrich friends and family members, and to maintain control
over business assets. In some cases, the foundations were engaged
in little or no philanthropy. In 1969, Congress passed reforms
that limited the amount of money that foundations can pay to
employees, required foundations to donate at least 5 percent of
their assets each year to charitable causes, and restricted the
amount of stock a foundation can hold in any single corporation.
In the 1990s, the Bradley-funded National Commission on
Philanthropy and Civic Renewal, headed by current Sen. Lamar
Alexander, R-Tenn., studied the effectiveness of foundation
philanthropy. The commission’s 1997 report, Alexander recalled in
an interview, was one of the first serious critiques of
foundations in at least a decade. But, he explained, “we weren’t
Wright Patman.” Indeed, the commission concluded that foundations
were not doing enough to move government policy. “I’d like to see
foundations be the forerunners of government action,” Alexander
said.
According to Alexander, it is exceedingly difficult for
government to tackle controversial and experimental programs. By
contrast, he argued, foundations are free to pursue ideological
agendas and radical new public policy experiments that might not
appeal to the average American, but may ultimately prove highly
effective. Alexander cites welfare reform and school vouchers as
prime examples of foundation-backed pilot projects that
eventually became models for more-widespread action.
Today, it would seem, most in Washington agree with
Alexander. “I know of no big movement to limit foundations or
question them,” he said.
Laissez-Faire Thinking
Conservative foundations may be tiny compared with many middle-
of-the-road organizations, but they are taking full advantage of
that laissez-faire attitude, and none more so than the Bradley
Foundation. The trust was founded in 1985 after the family sold
its motor-components business, the Allen-Bradley Co., to Rockwell
International. The brothers who had founded Allen-Bradley, Harry
and Lynde Bradley, had long since passed away. But Grebe, who
last year took over for longtime foundation President Michael
Joyce, says that the foundation has stayed true to its original
donors’ conservative values. And the Bradley Foundation can
justly claim credit for fueling two of the most promising
conservative movements of the last decade: school vouchers and
welfare reform.
In the mid-1980s, the Bradley Foundation began to fund
the research of two conservative scholars, John Chubb and Terry
Moe, into public education. Their 1990 book, Politics, Markets,
and America’s Schools, exhaustively detailed the failings of
public schools and urged broad reforms. One such reform, the
authors suggested, would be a system of vouchers in which parents
could opt out of the public school system and use the money to
send their children to private and religious schools.
It was a revolutionary concept then, and it remains
controversial today. But the Bradley Foundation was enthusiastic
from the start. It began to fund additional research that
eventually prompted Wisconsin’s state Legislature to fund a small
pilot program in Milwaukee. When legal challenges from teachers
unions and First Amendment activists-who objected to channeling
public funds to religious schools-stymied that program, the
Bradley Foundation stepped in to fund the program privately. In
addition, Bradley continued to pay for the legal defense of the
state-run program, ultimately winning a decisive state Supreme
Court victory in 1991. Soon thereafter, the state restarted its
voucher program on a larger scale.
Clint Bolick is one of the lawyers who defended
Milwaukee’s voucher program. The Bradley Foundation, he said, was
“willing to get into the trenches with their philanthropy.” In
1990, “there was not a single urban choice program. Bradley
created something out of nothing.” To the present day, Bradley
continues to fund Bolick’s public-interest law firm, the
Institute for Justice, which is defending school voucher programs
nationwide.
Around the same time, the Bradley Foundation embarked on
another crusade, this time to reform Wisconsin’s welfare system.
Then-Gov. Tommy Thompson was an early reform proponent. The state
welfare program Thompson implemented-which ended the welfare
entitlement, set a time limit on receipt of benefits, and
required recipients to work for their welfare checks-is widely
credited with sparking the 1996 federal reforms that became a
hallmark of the Clinton presidency.
In designing his reforms, Thompson relied heavily on
research performed by the Hudson Institute, which had received
nearly $2 million from Bradley in the early 1990s to support
welfare policy research.
At the same time, the John M. Olin Foundation, whose
benefactor was a conservative ammunition manufacturer, has gained
attention for its funding of research done by opponents of
affirmative action and gun control. Olin, for example, helped
former Reagan administration official Linda Chavez found the
Center for Equal Opportunity, a group known for criticizing
affirmative action.
Meanwhile, American Enterprise Institute scholar John
Lott wrote More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun
Control Laws while on an Olin fellowship at the University of
Chicago in the late 1990s. His book’s argument-that states that
passed laws allowing citizens to carry concealed firearms have
seen a reduction in violent crime-has made him a favorite of the
National Rifle Association and a reviled foe of gun control
activists.
Long-Term Funding
As often as the conservative foundations have championed
innovative policy proposals, they have also proved far more
willing than their liberal counterparts to simply fund their
favored organizations and intellectuals with few, if any, strings
attached.
Numerous institutions of the conservative intelligentsia
were formed with foundation money, often in the form of general
operating grants that aren’t tied to any particular program.
Think tanks are the prime example, but there are many other
grantees that are best described as activist groups. The Olin
Foundation, for example, has for years funded the Federalist
Society, the conservative legal organization that has counted as
members many of President Bush’s judicial and political
appointees.
For years, the anti-regulatory Citizens for a Sound
Economy Foundation has been living off conservative foundation
money, as have the Free Congress Foundation, which advocates
conservative social policies, and the American Legislative
Exchange Council, which is a clearinghouse for conservative state
lawmakers. In many instances, the conservative foundations have
simply picked a conservative scholar and funded his work over a
period of years. The list of these grantees includes such
prominent writers as William Bennett, Allan Bloom, Dinesh
D’Souza, and Charles Murray.
Perhaps the best example of this type of long-term
funding is the David Koch Foundation’s support for the Cato
Institute. For more than 25 years, since the founding of the
institute, Koch has funded Cato’s efforts to bring Social
Security privatization into the political mainstream. David Koch,
executive vice president of Kansas-based energy firm Koch
Industries, currently sits on Cato’s board of directors.
In more recent years, Charles Koch, David’s brother, has
been nearly as generous with George Mason University, giving more
than $10 million to support the creation and continuing
operations of the anti-regulatory Mercatus Center. Koch’s first
grant, which got Mercatus off the ground, was for five years, a
length of time that is extremely rare in the world of grant-
making. Mercatus has used the money to critique the performances
of federal agencies and federal regulations and to run a popular
lecture series for Capitol Hill staffers.
As John Miller recently wrote in a report for the
conservative Philanthropy Roundtable, “A small handful of
foundations have essentially provided the conservative movement
with its venture capital.” Liberals, notably, agree. Cohen of the
National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy says that
conservative foundations are “institution builders,” while
mainstream and liberal foundations are merely “project
supporters.”
The next big success story for the conservative
foundations, predicts Rutgers University professor David Popenoe,
may be the restoration of a traditional view of marriage in
American society. Since 1996, Popenoe wrote in a recent article
for Philanthropy magazine, “a marriage movement in America has
blossomed, supported in part by foundation dollars.”
In recent years, foundation money has backed the Heritage
Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, Focus on the Family, the
Family Research Council, and other conservative institutions in
their efforts to promote marriage through the issuing of reports.
And the work of these groups has helped move the debate. Popenoe
argues that Americans increasingly are thinking of marriage again
as a central building block of society; consequently, the
percentages of single-parent families and teen pregnancies are
dropping. This year, the Bush administration has picked up on
this theme as well, and has included funding for marriage
promotion in its reauthorization plan for the 1996 welfare
reforms.
‘Follow Your Heart’
The large traditional foundations provide a striking contrast to
their conservative brethren. The Henry J. Kaiser Family
Foundation, with $600 million in assets in 2001, is another
Washington fixture, and it has long funded events on, and
research about, the health care system. Last month, the Kaiser
Foundation opened a new downtown office with state-of-the-art
conference and broadcast facilities and a health-related news
ticker tape. Even so, said foundation President Drew Altman,
“we’re not an advocacy group.” Rather, the foundation’s role, he
said, is as a “purveyor of credible and objective research …
from all sides of the ideological spectrum.”
The Pew Charitable Trusts, also one of the most prominent
foundations in Washington, with more than $4 billion in assets in
2001, often targets its funding to groups lobbying on some of the
most controversial public policy fights of the moment. Last year
alone, Pew doled out $17 million to advocates of campaign finance
reform who were seeking to influence the congressional debate on
this issue. Reform proponent Trevor Potter, a former commissioner
on the Federal Election Commission, was one of Pew’s principal
grantees. But Pew also gave money to Jack Kemp’s Empower America,
a think tank that favored a far different system.
Pew President Rebecca Rimel and her colleagues call
themselves “raging moderates.” And, to be sure, it’s hard to pin
down an organization that gives money to both Potter and Kemp, to
the environmentalist Sierra Club, and to the anti-regulatory
Citizens for a Sound Economy. Pew, Rimel explains, views its role
not as an advocate, but as a discussion builder. Pew will target
an issue area-such as campaign finance reform-and then fund
thinkers on all sides of the debate. Let the best idea win, she
says.
Ironically, adamant conservatives founded Pew. J. Howard
Pew, who ran the family oil business for 35 years directed that
his foundation, one of the seven Pew trusts, “acquaint the
American people [with] the values of a free market [and] the
vital need to maintain and preserve a limited form of
government.”
The Ford Foundation, No. 3 among all foundations with
assets of nearly $11 billion in 2001, is perhaps the most
activist of the large foundations. It has funded myriad
Washington groups and causes, from liberal think tanks such as
the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the Economic
Policy Institute to civil-rights organizations such as the
National Council of La Raza. Ironically, it, too, was once a
conservative bastion.
Henry Ford II was badly disturbed by his family
foundation’s leftward trend in the 1960s and 1970s, and he quit
the foundation’s board. In his resignation letter, Ford suggested
that the board might consider the possibility that “the
[capitalist] system that makes the foundation possible very
probably is worth preserving.” John M. Olin was so affected by
Ford’s decision, and so convinced that his own foundation would
inevitably be co-opted, that he decreed that the Olin Foundation
would survive no longer than one generation after his death. True
to its donor’s intent, the Olin board is currently spending down
the foundation’s resources and plans to close its doors by the
end of 2005.
Cohen says that most of the large foundations put
considerable effort into monitoring the results of their grants,
and they require extensive paperwork from their grantees. The
conservative foundations take a more relaxed approach, he says.
Voegeli, the Olin program officer, agrees: “Unlike the private
sector, where you can read the balance sheets, we must rely much
less on quantitative results,” he says. “We use common sense:
Which groups are getting the most traction? Which arguments are
getting noticed?”
That approach, says Occidental professor Dreier, works
best in public policy grant-making, where goals often take years,
if not decades, to achieve. “Right-wing foundations give a blank
check and say, ‘Follow your heart,’ ” Dreier said, adding that,
by contrast, “every liberal foundation asks for a set of
deliverables, and wants to look at your progress every six
months.”
And many left-of-center activists are clearly jealous.
Indeed, a recent forum on philanthropy held in Washington by the
National Community Reinvestment Coalition provided a good example
of the tension that exists between many liberals and their
foundation benefactors. Challenging the panel of liberal
foundation executives, coalition President John Taylor asked
sarcastically whether any of them were worthy of the name. “Left-
wing foundations?” he asked. “Like who?”
Among the panelists from liberal foundations, the
consensus was that foundations should put more money into
“advocacy and organizing.” (Foundations attending included the
Open Society Institute, the New York Foundation, and the Edward
W. Hazen Foundation.) But frustration from the activists was
palpable, and the message they delivered was clear: “We’re so
frustrated with piddling grants,” said Taylor. “We want to make a
real difference in our communities, but no one will fund us to do
that.”
To be fair, many liberal foundations have taken up public
policy causes. George Soros’s Open Society Institute Policy
Center, for one, has urged a halt in new prison construction. The
Public Welfare Foundation has funded the “environmental justice”
movement, helping local groups in poor and minority communities
organize to fight environmental hazards. Some, including the Open
Society Institute and the California-based Kirsch Foundation,
have even set up separate arms to lobby Congress directly.
And in some cases, liberal foundations have proved just
as generous and foresighted in funding liberal intellectuals as
conservative foundations have been in funding their top thinkers.
For example, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities-perhaps
the best-respected liberal think tank in Washington-receives 90
percent of its funding from foundations. Perhaps less strident in
their analyses, but generally considered left-of-center, are the
Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute, two other think
tanks that have benefited handsomely from foundation funding. The
Urban Institute, according to the Foundation Center, was the top
think-tank recipient of foundation largesse from 1998 to 2002,
taking in more than $58 million.
And liberal foundations are increasingly willing to take
on causes that challenge deeply rooted values and societal
stereotypes. The Arcus Foundation, for example, last year
provided the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force with a $1
million grant, the largest in its history, to support
organizational efforts in the 50 states. “When I first started
out in fundraising, no foundations would give to [gay and
lesbian] organizations,” says soon-to-be former task force
Executive Director Lorri Jean. “Now, more and more are.”
In recent months, some smaller foundations have plowed
money into the anti-war movement. The Institute for Policy
Studies, a liberal think tank that receives funding from the
Ford, MacArthur, and Turner Foundations, has provided office
space for Code Pink Women for Peace, one of the most prominent
anti-war groups, The Washington Times has reported. San
Francisco’s Tides Foundation has given $1.5 million to anti-war
efforts since September 11, 2001, according to The Times,
including paying the salary for the director of the Win Without
War coalition. Similarly, the Turner Foundation and the San
Francisco-based Plowshares Fund have provided $1.5 million in
funding to TrueMajority.com, allowing the activist group to pay
for five full-time staffers and six consultants.
Even so, executives at liberal foundations acknowledge
that culture clashes between liberal activists and their
foundation benefactors are a regular occurrence. The very concept
of private foundations should make liberals uncomfortable,
explains Larry Kressley, executive director of the Public Welfare
Foundation. “Foundations preserve the influence and resources of
rich people,” he said.
Such an objection, of course, is not a problem for
conservative activists. But, says Kressley, “a left way of
thinking would be that in a just society, foundations wouldn’t
exist. It’s almost an oxymoron to have ‘progressive’ and
‘foundation’ in the same phrase.”
Throughout the history of liberal movements, most have
risen from the grassroots, said Gara LaMarche, vice president and
director of U.S. programs for the Open Society Institute. That
may be an inherent difference between liberal and conservative
activism. Liberal activists, LaMarche said, should do everything
they can “to leverage foundations, but [should] recognize that
foundations are only part of what needs to change” in order for
liberal movements to gain traction in Washington.
Meanwhile, conservative grant-makers, spared any cultural
clashes with their movement activists and intellectuals, or with
their generous benefactors, are just hoping to build on their
successes. The Bradley Foundation, for one, has recently launched
an effort to recruit additional conservative foundations into the
fold.
“We think that over the course of the next few years,
there will be a tremendous amount of wealth transferred to
philanthropic foundations,” Grebe said. “We would like to make
sure that more of it goes to conservative causes.”